within three weeks in January and February of the year above mentioned. A few of the most daring cases may be quoted. Three highwaymen stopped a gentleman of the prince's household in Poland Street, and made the watchman throw away his lantern and stand quietly by while they robbed and ill-used their victim. Other highwaymen the same night fired at Colonel Montague's carriage as it passed along Frith Street, Soho, because the coachman refused to stand; and the Dutchess of Montrose, coming from court in her chair, was stopped by highwaymen near Bond Street. The mails going out and coming into London were seized and rifled. Post-boys, stagecoaches, everybody and everything that travelled, were attacked. A great peer, the Duke of Chandos, was twice stopped during the period above mentioned, but he and his servants were too strong for the villains, some of whom they captured. People were robbed in Chelsea, in Cheapside, in White Conduit Fields, in Denmark Street, St. Giles. Wade, in his "British Chronology," under the head of public calamities in 1729, classes with a sickly season, perpetual storms, and incessant rains, the dangerous condition of the cities of London and Westminster and their neighbourhoods, which "proceeded from the number of footpads and street-robbers, insomuch that there was no stirring out after dark for fear of mischief. These ruffians knocked people down and wounded them
before they demanded their money." Large rewards were offered for the apprehension of these offenders. Thief-catchers and informers were continually active, and the law did not hesitate to strike all upon whom it could lay its hands. Yet crime still flourished and increased year after year.
The Englishman's house, and proverbially his castle, was no more secure then than now from burglarious inroads. Housebreakers abounded, working in gangs with consummate skill and patience, hand and glove with servants past and present, associated with receivers, and especially with the drivers of night coaches. Half the hackney-coachmen about this time were in league with thieves, being bribed by nocturnal depredators to wait about when a robbery was imminent, and until it was completed. Then, seizing the chance of watchmen being off their beat, these useful accomplices drove at once to the receiver with the "swag."
Towards the middle of the century, Henry Fielding, the great novelist, and at that time acting magistrate for Westminster, wrote:[251:1] "I make no doubt but that the streets of this town and the roads leading to it will shortly be impassable without the utmost hazard; nor are we threatened with seeing less dangerous groups of rogues amongst us than those which the Italians call banditti. . . ." Again, "If I am to be assaulted and pillaged and
plundered, if I can neither sleep in my own house, nor walk the streets, nor travel in safety, is not my condition almost equally bad whether a licensed or an unlicensed rogue, a dragoon or a robber, be the person who assaults and plunders me?" Those who set the law at defiance organized themselves into gangs, and coöperated in crime. Fielding tells us in the same work that nearly a hundred rogues were incorporated in one body, "have officers and a treasury, and have reduced theft and robbery into a regular system." Among them were men who appeared in all disguises and mixed in all companies. The members of the society were not only versed in every art of cheating and thieving, but they were armed to evade the law, and if a prisoner could not be rescued, a prosecutor could be bribed, or some "rotten member of the law" forged a defence supported by false witnesses. This must have been perpetuated, for I find another reference later to the Thieves or Housebreaker's Company which had regular books, kept clerks, opened accounts with members, and duly divided the profits. According to the confession of two of the gang who were executed on Kensington Common, they declared that their profits amounted on an average to £500 a year, and that one of them had put by £2,000 in the stocks, which before his trial he made over to a friend to preserve it for his family. Another desperate gang, Wade says, were so audacious that they went to the houses of the peace officers, and
made them beg pardon for endeavouring to do their duty, and promise not to molest them. They went further, and even attacked and wounded a "head borough" in St. John's Street in about forty places, so that many of the threatened officers had to "lie in Bridewell for safety."
In Harris's "Life of Lord Hardwicke" is a letter from the solicitor to the Treasury to Sir Philip Yorke, referring to "the gang of ruffians who are so notorious for their robberies, and have lately murdered Thomas Bull in Southwark, and wounded others. Their numbers daily increase, and now become so formidable that constables are intimidated by their threats and desperate behaviour from any endeavour to apprehend them." One of these ruffians was described in the proclamation offering rewards for their apprehension as "above six feet high, black eyebrows, his teeth broke before;" another had a large scar under his chin.
Still worse was the "Resolution Club," a numerous gang, regularly organized under stringent rules. It was one of their articles, that whoever resisted or attempt to fly when stopped should be instantly cut down and crippled. Any person who prosecuted, or appeared as evidence against a member of the club, should be marked down for vengeance. The members took an "infernal oath" to obey the rules, and if taken and sentenced to "die mute." Another instance of the lawlessness of the times is to be seen in the desperate attack made by
some forty ruffians on a watch-house in Moorfields, where an accomplice was kept a prisoner. They were armed with pistols, cutlasses, and other offensive weapons. The watchman was wounded, the prisoner rescued. After this the assailants demolished the watch-house, robbed the constables, "committed several unparalleled outrages, and went off in triumph." The gang was too numerous to be quickly subdued, but most of the rioters were eventually apprehended, and it is satisfactory to learn that they were sentenced to imprisonment in Newgate for three, five, or seven years, according to the part they had played.
The contempt of the majesty of the law was not limited to the lower and dangerous classes. A gentleman's maid servant, having resisted the parish officers who had a distress warrant upon the gentleman's house for unpaid rates, was committed by the magistrates to Newgate. "The gentleman," by name William Frankland, on learning what had happened, armed himself with a brace of pistols, and went to the office where the justices were then sitting, and asked which of them had dared to commit his servant to prison. "Mr. Miller," so runs the account, "smilingly replied, 'I did,' on which the gentleman fired one of his pistols and shot Mr. Miller in the side, but it is thought did not wound him mortally. He was instantly secured and committed to Newgate." At the following Old Bailey Sessions, he was tried under the Black Act, when